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willow plantations in Ireland, and that they are there called "sally gardens". No doubt you remember Yeats's line about them.

On the right of the river road the ground rose quite steeply. Rows of caves had been dug from solid stone in those hillsides. They were arranged in successive tiers, one row opening at road level and two or three more higher up. A street ran horizontally in front of each tier. The caves had masonry fronts with windows and doors. Some of them extended far enough out from the hillside to have side windows and a stretch or roof above. Along that 6-mile route we passed four or five villages of such cave dwellings.

I never entered one of those dwellings. They must have been warm in winter, but rather dark and stuffy. I don't know what plumbing arrangements they had, if any. The village nearest to Saumur was the largest and was called Dampierre. As I recall the only building it had above ground was the town hall. Our section was taken there once by de Salinelles, our instructor, for an interview with the mayor. We were engaged in an exercise involving the quartering of troops in the village. That was a contingency for which every town and village in France had to be ready at all times. The military authorities had set, for each locality, the maximum number of officers and enlisted men it might be called upon to house. It was then up to the mayor and his constituents to decide how those uninvited guests should be distributed among the households ^[[of]] the community.  The mayor had to keep at his office an up-to-date listing. In this instance we were playing at moving a battery of 75's into Dampierre. The mayor had his list ready, bedrooms for the officers, barns and such like for the enlisted men.

The mayor was a big, muscular middle-aged peasant. He was quite genial about it, knowing that it was just make-believe. When our ^[[strikethrough]]busines[/strikethrough]] business was over he served wine to all 20 of us and invited us to take a look at his barn. His home was a cave on the highest street. His barn was a much bigger cave still higher up. Its front was a kind of lattice of heavy timbers, admitting some light to the interior. More light came through a hole in the roof, six or eight feet in diameter and opening into a field at the top of the hill. The hole let in rain as well, but around the walls the overhang was enough to keep the rain away from anything stored there. Separate compartments contained hay,